In this blog I talk about some of the personal programming I do as a hobby. By trade I'm a Java and database developer but I've dabbled in Haskell, front-end development, etc. I'm currently working as an architect but still enjoy getting my fingers dirty in code!

Sunday, July 20, 2014

BuildWrapper/EclipseFP and GHC 7.8

I've been working on some issues related to GHC 7.8 in BuildWrapper and EclipseFP. On the EclipseFP side, mainly the quickfixes are affected, because EclipseFP parses the GHC error messages to offer them, and the quotes characters have changed in the GHC 7.8 messages.

On the BuildWrapper side, things are more complex. Adapting to API changes wasn't a big deal, but it seems that GHC bugs involving the GHC API, static linking and other unknowns cause some things to break. The solution I've found was to build BuildWrapper with the -dynamic flag. But I couldn't upload this to hackage because Cabal thinks that -dynamic is a debug flag (it starts with d). I've sent a bug fix to Cabal, so in the next release that'll be fixed. So if you're using GHC 7.8 and BuildWrapper, you may want to rebuild the executable with -dynamic (uncomment the relevant line in the cabal file).

Note: BuildWrapper comes with a comprehensive test suite (90 tests covering all aspects). So you can always build the tests and run them to ensure everyting is OK on your system.